" "

How Do You Handle Daily Tasks?

Daily tasks confound people.  How do I put them in my Personal Kanban? How do I visualize work that I do every day?  Many people actually make new tickets each morning and move them into Done during the day, adding to the monotony-not learning from it.Someone on Quora recently asked how to deal with 'Dailies'.  Here is my response:There are a variety of ways to do this in Kanban apps, even ones like Trello with few features.The design of your system will of course depend on several factors like:

  • Are your every day tasks all or mostly all of your work?

  • Are you the only one who does these every day tasks or are they shared?

  • Are the every day tasks ones you learn from or are they … mindless?

  • Are the every day tasks fully repeated or do they change with context?

  • Do the every day tasks involve customers?

To answer the question for how I personally do it,I travel a lot, so I do use Trello.I have three inbound columns that track the High, Medium, and Low priorities of tasks I need done. (A priority filter).To the right of that, I have a column called “Dailies”. That has several tasks that require regular attention. Each day I’ll have one or two pomodoros that focus specifically on those tasks.Nothing special there.The trick is…turn your daily grind into something actually helpful.On the other side, kill your “Done” column and create two new ones.“Task Complete” and “Learning”.Especially from your Dailies, you should have some learning. How long it took, what the response was from the customer, ways to do it better, information it kicked back at you, etc.If you don’t learn from your dailies and they aren’t the reason you are there…delegate them.If you do learn from them, do it explicitly.When “Done” with a daily task, the marking of “Done” isn’t mindlessly moving a ticket to the right. It’s actually noting in the learning column what you learned that day, data you gathered, etc.General pro tip: If your work becomes mundane so do you. Make your dailies a growing experience.

" "